The present invention relates to an apparatus for automatically weighing and applying postage to envelopes and, in particular, to an apparatus cooperating with an envelope insertion machine stuffing envelopes with inserts which vary in weight and consequently require varying postage.
Envelope insertion machines have existed for many years in various forms. The purpose of envelope insertion machines is to allow a user to quickly and efficiently place advertising, bank statements, etc. in an envelope for mailing. In some situations, the particular items to be mailed vary in content and weight, as in bank statements, and in other situations, each envelope receives an identical insert. Mail insertion machines vary in cost from fairly inexpensive machines which are manually inserted by an operator stationed in front of the machine to highly sophisticated machines which handle the insertion mechanically as well as weigh, stamp and sort the various resulting pieces of mail. Examples of early machines of this type can be seen in the Williams U.S. Pat. No. 2,325,455 and the Sather et al. U.S. Pat. No. 3,368,321.
The present invention is directed to an apparatus or mechanism which is especially suited for cooperating with a manual insertion machine which requires an operator to manually place the insert within the envelope. An example of such a machine can be seen in the Russell U.S. Pat. No. 4,527,378. Manual insertion machines are normally a less expensive line of insertion devices and mail metering (that is, automatically weighing and applying postage to the envelopes after insertion) is usually either not available or an optional accessory. Such machines are normally utilized in conjunction with a conventional postage application machine (often manually fed) such as is sold by Pitney Bowes and other manufacturers to apply the correct postage after a determination has been made of the weight of the stuffed envelope.
Therefore, as the manual insertion machine is usually a separate mechanism from the postage application machine or, at least requires some transfer between the location where the insertion takes place and the location where the postage is applied, a mechanism was desired that would coordinate the transfer between the insertion stage and the postage application such that the application of postage could be accomplished without extensive manual labor.
A further problem associated with applying postage to manually inserted envelopes is that for many insertion machines the front of the envelope must face down so that the flap of the envelope can pass between some device to hold the flap down and out of the way of the operator while insertion is being made. However, most postage metering machines, except for large sophisticated machines which have built-in mail metering, require that the front of the envelope face upward when the postage is being applied to the letter. Consequently, the letter must be rotated about a horizontal axis approximately 180.degree. after the insertion process so that the letter will then be in the right position for the application of postage. It is also important that the envelope rotation be carefully controlled, so that the envelopes will be properly positioned to be received by the mail metering machine after rotation.